New Teacher Effectiveness and Tenure

A new report on teacher effectiveness may support the
traditional three-year probation period before teachers are awarded tenure.

Researchers tracked 7600 new teachers of math and
English/language arts in New York City from 2000-2006. All of them taught 4th or 5th
grade during that time. Cutting to the
chase, researchers found that beginning teachers who were rated in the bottom
20% from the outset remained in the bottom 20% after five years based on
value-added measures. Teachers who were
high performing at the beginning remained high performing after five years. The research took into account student
demographics like gender, ethnicity, poverty, and attendance.

The work was conducted by Allison Atteberry, a research
associate at the University of Virginia; Susanna Loeb, director of the Center
for Policy Analysis at Stanford
University; and James H. Wyckoff, an education professor at the University of
Virginia. The researchers presented
their findings at the CALDER (The National
Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research) conference
in February.

The data is new, and researchers are not encouraging principals
to let struggling teachers go after a couple of years. Still, researchers insist, the results are
compelling.

In New York State, where the research was conducted,
teachers generally are awarded tenure after three years. As a superintendent, I nearly always made the
decision to let new teachers go after two years if I
didn’t see real growth. Some may say I was too quick, but my
experience led me to believe if I wasn’t seeing improvement after two years, I
probably wouldn’t see it after five or ten or twenty. In addition, teachers who are denied tenure
after three years have a hard time finding another teaching job. Perhaps my judgment was incorrect, but maybe
some teachers I dismissed would find more success in another environment, I
thought.

This research, of course, supports what I already thought,
and quick acceptance of it, while reaffirming, is dangerous. But granting tenure to mediocre teachers is
even more dangerous. If you haven’t seen
a quality job after three years, it’s not likely that you will after 5 or 10,
let alone 20.